We thank the Direzione Generale per gli Archivi and the Istituto Centrale per gli Archivi for their guidelines and advice. The Project was able to draw on work done for the parallel national SIAS and SAN projects.

The preparation of the site, which includes computerised management of the repositories in the two premises of the Archivio di Stato and the Reading Rooms, was part of the Maintaining the Memory Project (Progetto Mantenere la Memoria) funded by the Compagnia di San Paolo Foundation, entrusted toAmici dell’Archivio di Stato di Torino Association (Project Director: Maria Antonia Ricchiuto).

All the software used to develop the Internet site and the Management System is open sourced.

The site was developed using a CMS Joomla! platform. It was designed to guarantee maximum access to the contents, in compliance with current quality standards, bearing guidelines of usability in mind and following the rules outlined by the W3C Consortium (XHTML 1.0 with strict DTD and using Cascading Style Sheets).

The database that manages the archival heritage and related surfing pages were developed using a platform developed in a Linux environment, with specially developed libraries, dbms PostgreSQL and PHP scripting language.

The site archive

The Internet site of the Archivio di Stato di Torino was created in the early 1990s, a period in which the world of archives gradually opened its doors to the innovations introduced by IT. The Turin Institute studied the models offered by the French and British National Archives, developing the project further. In 1996, the Turin Archives switched on “Archeion”, a computerised management system for its reading room, which provides an innovative description of the fonds, series and subseries, right down to the individual items, making it possible to surf between them.The online migration of the “Archeion” databank constitutes the main innovation of the new Internet site from an archival perspective: the web platform does not only supply the institutional data and information (addresses, telephone numbers, opening hours, etc.) in the Archive to users statically, but also allows visitors to dynamically interrogate the fonds preserved by the Institute (particularly from the Sezione Corte), the digital inventories and to reserve archive items they wish to consult, by electronic mail from home. These are features that put the site in the forefront among similar archive sites.

In 2000 the site offered users a new service: the maps that were digitalised by the Archivio di Stato as part of the “Imago2” project” were published online: users were thus able to consult the digital images of the maps from home, initially in high definition, then, following technical problems, at low resolution, supported by the respective description files, which could also be viewed from the Archive Reading Room.

Another innovative initiative in 2007 was the inclusion of the database describing the seals conserved in the Archivio di Stato di Torino, complete with photographs of many of them: an interesting initiative for all seal scholars, heraldry experts and mediaeval scholars.

However, it was already becoming evident that the site needed reorganising; it was on the cutting edge at its launch but after ten years the site appeared old, and it was proving increasingly difficult to respond suitably to the growing requests from the public, who had become accustomed to using the web and exploiting its potential. This triggered consultations that led to the creation of the new Internet site of the Archivio di Stato di Torino in 2011.To view the previous Archivio di Stato di Torino site, click here.